DELIUS SEA DRIFT • SONGS OF FAREWELL • SONGS OF SUNSET Bournemouth Symphony Bryn Terfel baritone Orchestra with Choirs Sally Burgess mezzo-soprano Richard Hickox Greg Barrett Richard Hickox (1948 – 2008) Frederick Delius (1862 – 1934) 1 Sea Drift* 26:00 for baritone, chorus, and orchestra Songs of Farewell 18:04 for double chorus and orchestra 2 I Double Chorus: ‘How sweet the silent backward tracings!’ 4:28 3 II Chorus: ‘I stand as on some mighty eagle’s beak’ 4:39 4 III Chorus: ‘Passage to you! O secret of the earth and sky!’ 3:33 5 IV Double Chorus: ‘Joy, shipmate, joy!’ 1:31 6 V Chorus: ‘Now finalè to the shore’ 3:50 3 Songs of Sunset*† 32:59 for mezzo-soprano, baritone, chorus, and orchestra 7 Chorus: ‘A song of the setting sun!’ – 3:24 8 Soli: ‘Cease smiling, Dear! a little while be sad’ – 4:46 9 Chorus: ‘Pale amber sunlight falls…’ – 4:26 10 Mezzo-soprano: ‘Exceeding sorrow Consumeth my sad heart!’ – 3:43 11 Baritone: ‘By the sad waters of separation’ – 4:49 12 Chorus: ‘See how the trees and the osiers lithe’ – 3:35 13 Baritone: ‘I was not sorrowful, I could not weep’ – 4:46 14 Soli, Chorus: ‘They are not long, the weeping and the laughter’ 3:34 TT 77:20 Sally Burgess mezzo-soprano† Bryn Terfel baritone* Waynflete Singers David Hill director Southern Voices Graham Caldbeck chorus master Members of the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus Neville Creed chorus master Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra Brendan O’Brien leader Richard Hickox 4 Delius: Sea Drift / Songs of Sunset / Songs of Farewell Sea Drift into which the chorus’s commentaries are Both Sea Drift (1903 – 04) and Songs of Sunset effortlessly intermingled. Typically of Delius, (1906 – 07) belong to the fertile decade it is redolent with brief, memorable melodic following the turn of the century, when phrases at the key moments of heightened Frederick Delius (1862 – 1934) had assumed emotion. The poetry is suffused with images complete maturity and was producing a of love, the sea, and death, as Whitman string of masterpieces. Among these, Sea observes two mating birds, the male’s Drift is regarded by many as his greatest bewilderment following the death of the achievement. It received its first performance female becoming analogous to the human in Essen in 1906, and its British premiere two experience of loss and grief. When Whitman’s years later in Sheffield under Henry Wood, words are combined with Delius’s music the with Frederic Austin as soloist. effect is heightened to an overwhelming Setting words by Walt Whitman, and scored intensity. for baritone, chorus, and orchestra, the work A descending woodwind phrase, combined is cast in a single span, the seven internal with the ebb and flow of the bass line, etches subsections dictated by the text. In all his the ocean at the opening, whilst the chorus works, Delius attempted to achieve a ‘sense of describes the mating ‘guests from Alabama’ flow’ and Sea Drift is the supreme realisation of and the baritone the watching boy. The this vision. As Delius explained to Eric Fenby: contented parental activities of the birds The shape of it was taken out of my hands, are epitomised by the chorus’s rapturous so to speak, as I worked, and was bred ‘Shine! Shine! Shine! / Pour down your warmth, easily of my particular musical ideas, and great sun!’ and the ecstatic passage ‘Singing the nature and sequence of the particular all time, minding no time’. Tragedy strikes poetical ideas of Whitman that appealed though, and in the chorus’s ‘Blow! blow! to me. blow! / Blow up sea-winds’ the male calls The soloist’s melodic line is a supple on these to waft her back. Increasingly, the (and subtle) mixture of recitative and arioso bird’s plight becomes synonymous with 5 human emotions, as heard in the magical in the wake of tragedy that are explored, phrase ‘Yes my brother’ which has the in Songs of Sunset it is the brevity of life character of a negro spiritual. As the music as epitomised by the work’s original title, gathers momentum, the bird imagines that he ‘Songs of Twilight and Sadness’. Thoughts of sees his mate and in desperation ‘shoot[s]’ transience haunted Delius, so it was natural his ‘voice over the waves’, ushering a climax that he would be drawn to the fin-de-siècle with the cry that ‘You must know who I am, poetry of Ernest Dowson (1867 – 1900), and its my love!’ But the music tumbles away, as if in symbols of ardent, sensual desire combined despairing disappointment. with those of decay, autumn, and death. At ‘O rising stars!’ the hushed accompanied Delius dedicated the work to the Elberfeld chorus echoes the earlier ‘Shine! Shine! Shine!’, Choral Society whose conductor, Hans Haym, emphasising the change in circumstances. was one of his principal German advocates; The baritone joins in this wonderful nocturnal however, they did not perform the work until passage, evoking the ‘carols of lonesome 1914, three years following its premiere in love’. But now the bird is convinced that he London under Thomas Beecham. Perhaps has heard her voice; the pathos of his longing Elberfeld’s delay was due to misgivings which is depicted by a yearning chromatic melodic Haym had about the piece; in a letter of 1913 fragment and a phrase full of tenderness and he had written: sorrow at ‘This gentle call is for you my love’. this is not a work for a wide public, but The chorus, as the spirit of the she-bird, begs rather for a smallish band of musical him not to delude himself, and the culmination isolates who are born decadents and life’s of the work is brought by a heart-rending, melancholics at the same time. dissonant climax when he realises that all is Delius defined form as the ‘imparting of ‘in vain’. In the final section their past ‘happy spiritual unity to one’s thought’ and this work, life’ is recalled; time, the healer, has brought again like Sea Drift, shows the consummate acceptance that he will see his mate ‘no more’. mastery of a highly idiosyncratic approach As the music fades, the chorus echoes his to structure. The work plays continuously, words like a whisper over the waves. and the transitions from one poem to another are totally unobtrusive, so that the seven Songs of Sunset sections move effortlessly to the work’s If in Sea Drift it is the emotions of bereavement climax shortly before the end. A unifying 6 element is a recurring four-note figure and Songs of Farewell, for double chorus and contrast is deftly achieved by a sensitive orchestra, was the finest achievement of palette of vocal and orchestral colours. this late harvest, and was first heard at the Among many fine inspirations is the Queen’s Hall, London in 1932, conducted by beginning of the second section, ‘Cease Malcolm Sargent. smiling, Dear! a little while be sad’; initially Its original conception dated from the the soloists echo each other, but then, fired beginning of the twenties, when the wife by desire, they join in rapturous unison at of Delius, Jelka (to whom he had dedicated ‘O red pomegranate of thy perfect mouth!’ – the work), chose a group of Whitman texts a simple, but devastatingly effective for the setting; however, work on it was laid musical image. Equally memorable is the aside for the composition of incidental music poignant mezzo-soprano solo, ‘Exceeding to James Elroy Flecker’s play Hassan. After sorrow / Consumeth my sad heart!’, with its that it was too late; the ravages of his illness echoes of the main theme of Appalachia; and overwhelmed him and the piece lay dormant lastly the climax of the work at which, for the until Fenby’s arrival. In Delius as I knew him only time, all forces combine for the telling Fenby describes the painstaking, slow writing line that sums up the central theme of the of the piece. Again it is transience that lies work: ‘They are not long, the days of wine at its heart, but whereas in Songs of Sunset and roses.’ there was defiance against the march of time, here, in old age, there is acceptance. Songs of Farewell The first three movements review the Delius wrote Sea Drift and Songs of Sunset past; particularly beautiful is the introduction in the white heat of his vigorous maturity. to ‘I stand as on some mighty eagle’s beak’, However, the circumstances behind the in which the rising and falling cello line composition of Songs of Farewell (1929 – 30) and the strange, lonely, rocking chords of could hardly have been more different; by this the introduction provide an extraordinary time Delius was blind, crippled, and helpless. evocation of the vast space of ocean and As a composer he had been mute since the sky imagined in the poem. The fourth and early 1920s, until the offer from a young fifth poems look forward to the greatest musician, Eric Fenby, to be his amanuensis mystery of all – the journey to death – but in kindled the sparks of creativity once more. a mood laden with excited anticipation rather 7 than trepidation. ‘Joy, shipmate, joy!’ rises Hänsel und Gretel, and Salome. With the to a powerful intensity with all the voices Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra he gave stretched to the limit, whilst in ‘Now finalè to the first ever complete cycle of Vaughan the shore’ the ecstatic climax ushers in the Williams’s symphonies in London. In the final weighing of the anchor, the setting sail course of an ongoing relationship with the over a calm, serene sea, and the chorus’s Philharmonia Orchestra he conducted Elgar, peaceful exhortation to the soul to ‘Depart’.